Carbon pricing in Canada isn’t dead yet. Despite weeks of furious lobbying by Conservative politicians, pundits, and oil and gas industry leaders to have the industrial carbon price eliminated, it was still a key part of Friday’s announced deal between Ottawa and Alberta. So too was the condition that any new pipeline to the West Coast would have to be paired with a major carbon capture and storage project, one that would meaningfully (if not entirely) reduce upstream emissions from the oil sands. 

None of that was good enough for this country’s more strident climate advocates, who panned the deal as a de-facto surrender to Alberta. It added to their frustration over the proposed changes to environmental regulation and permitting that were announced last week, ones that former environment minister Steven Guilbeault said “goes beyond what Harper proposed when he was in power.” Alberta journalist (and Canada’s National Observer contributor) Jeremy Appel summed up the mood in many climate circles during a recent Canadaland interview when he argued that “even if this pipeline doesn’t get built, we’ve still taken a wrecking ball to the edifice of federal climate policy for nothing.”

I would gently suggest that it’s a lot more than nothing. Mark Carney can’t prevent Danielle Smith from starting a political fire in her own backyard, after all. But he can stop it from burning more of the country than it needs to. The agreement with Alberta deprives the separatists — and the........

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